OhmyNews International

The riots in in Egypt have led to the government shutting down all Internet systems, and blocking sites such as Twitter and Facebook. So what of the citizen journalists? Well, they are finding a way. Despite SMS disruptions, thousands of people have been sending photos of the dead bodies, messages that scream: “Yes, this is a bloody war.” Many tourists on vacation in Cairo, and bloggers from around the world are stepping into the battle zone and proclaiming that they will get information out, regardless of the bullets being shot at them.

Here are links to some of the (VERY GRAPHIC) images that Egyptian citizens journalists are sending out: http://yfrog.com/h2k7satj http://yfrog.com/h71e4mmj http://yfrog.com/h3b3uyoj

Gregg Carlstrom (@glcarlstrom) is a blogger in Egypt and he recently tweeted: “This is how you know the Egyptian government is worried: it just shut off tourist access to the Pyramids. #Egypt”

To make matters even more difficult for citizen journalists of the world, the word “Egypt” is now blocked in China. Nobody can search Egypt, or read about the riots. Perhaps this is the the Chinese government saying, “Don’t get any ideas, folks.” And still, the Chinese are attempting to use various microblogging systems to see more.

No, despite Internet interruptions, news is getting out, and it is making the Egyptian rulers look like foolish beasts.

Some recent commentaries and articles on journalism have focused on fact-checking, a skill and task that should be taken seriously by professional and citizen journalists alike.

Let’s start with a Jan. 8, 2011, column by Arthur Brisbane, The New York Times’ public editor, who noted that The Times corrected 3,500 errors in 2010, most of which were errors in spellings, dates and historical facts.

Some of these errors were attributed to rushing on deadline, failing to check facts and misreading notes. Many of the errors, however, were attributed to “Googling a name and taking the spelling – or historical fact – as gospel.”

Many people rely on Google for basic information, but few realize the information that appears from a Google search could be inaccurate. They don’t even look at the information in a skeptical way.

In training citizen journalists, I always tell them that Google is a starting point – and only that. Just because information is found on the Internet does not mean it is true. All facts found through Google should be double-checked.

A second interesting example of fact-checking came from an article posted Jan. 25, 2011, by Newley Purnell, an American journalist in Thailand, who wrote about Associated Press reporter Thanyarat Doksone.

According to Purnell’s report, Doksone read a Twitter report from a Thai radio station saying that Bangkok’s anti-government, red-shirt protests last April and May had spread to the Asoke area of the Thai capital.

Rather than taking the Tweet as the gospel, Doksone decided to double-check the report.

Since she was in a different part of town, she took the extra step of asking her Twitter “followers” if they could confirm what had been reported. One of her followers who was in the area responded that “all was quiet and even posted an image to prove that there was no unrest of note,” Purnell wrote.

I guess both stories show the ups and downs of reporting in this technological age. You can’t always trust what you find on the Internet or on Twitter, but you can use those same tools to begin your research and/or to double-check what has been reported.

Susan Cormier is the head coach in charge of training at the National Association of Citizen Journalists (http://nacj.us/) and co-author of the “Handbook for Citizen Journalists” (http://www.citizenjournalistnow.com/).

A recent interview with the author of “On Writing Well” brought up some good writing points that are worth repeating.

Author William Zinsser highlighted five tips in his interview with Mallary Jean Tenore of Poynter.org. Two of the five really resonated with me. They were to take your readers on a journey and to have confidence in yourself as a writer.

“All writing to me is a journey. It’s saying to the reader, ‘Come along with me; I’ll take you on a voyage’,” Zinsser was quoted as saying in Tenore’s article.

Zinsser also said that too often people become so preoccupied with writing well that they clutter their stories with unnecessary words that lead readers astray. Good writers make every word count, and they avoid abstractions, he told Tenore.

“Nobody wants abstractions,” Zinsser said. “They want specific details that help them discover something new.”

I totally agree. Unnecessary words tend to take away from the point of an article. I think readers want to know what any story is about in a short and to-the-point manner. Take out the cutesy, fluff words and write it straight.

The second tip that I loved was to “have confidence in yourself as a writer.”

Confidences comes with trusting your instincts as a writer and learning to advocate for the stories you want to write, Zinsser said in the interview.

The word instincts took me back to the days when I was a young editor and reporter for Cox Newspapers in Arizona. My boss during some of those years, Hal DeKeyser, used to always tell me to trust my instincts.

It was advice that he often had to repeat. But in the end, it stuck with me and has served me well to this day.

By the way, the other three writing tips were to:

• Think of writing as a process, not a product;
• Write for yourself, not others; and
• Don’t take yourself too seriously.

Susan Cormier is the head coach in charge of training at the National Association of Citizen Journalists (http://nacj.us/) and co-author of the “Handbook for Citizen Journalists” (http://www.citizenjournalistnow.com/).

“I think that change and progress begin when people stop standing aloof and start to participate. I hope we make change and progress in 2012 through civic participation.”

As soon as Guk Cho, professor at Seoul National University Law School, ended his speech, the audience burst into thunderous applause. It was a flare that signaled the opening of the Guk Cho • Yeon-ho Oh Book Concert.

On December 27, 2010, year-end concerts were everywhere in Korea. The book concert held in EWHA University’s 100^th Memorial Hall had a special meaning in the flood of year-end concerts because it was based on civic participation. The audience did not come to see celebrity performances but to express their views and talk about the future of Korea.

The Guk Cho • Yeon-ho Oh Book Concert began as a joke. Yeon-ho Oh, founder and CEO of Ohmynews, mentioned in passing in a tweet that he would hold a small book concert in a pub if his book Plan for Liberals to Seize Power published three impressions. His words would not have been taken seriously if he had announced it to a small number of people. However, because his words spread to thousands of people on Twitter, and because people really wanted the concert to happen, his joke became a promise to keep. Eventually Plan for Liberals to Seize Power published three impressions, and citizens made the joke a reality.

Citizens did more than just instigating the creation of the concert. Thirty citizens who were active in promoting Plan for Liberals to Seize Power started an arrangement committee. The arrangement committee organized the book concert with civic participation-based programs. At the concert rehearsal, held in a pub near Gwanghwamun, the committee worked smoothly, as the members had known each other for a long time. When one member suggested that they sing the song “As Time Goes By” with choreography in the closing ceremony, several other members choreographed on the spot. Aside from the arrangement committee, other citizens played a huge role. Because of the promotion by the citizens in social media sites, all 430 seats sold out in three days.

At the concert, the effort of the arrangement committee and other citizens paid back. The programs organized with ideas by citizens made people laugh. The highlight of the concert was a program called “If I Were Yeon-ho Oh I Would Ask Guk Cho This,” in which Professor Cho answered questions that the audience wrote down before entering the concert hall. Questions such as “What’s your beauty secret?” made people burst into laughter, and other ones such as “What would you first do if you become president of Korea?” made people listen carefully.

The concert was made possible by citizens using social media, which successfully brought together those from different regions. Social media is designed to be disseminated through social interaction, using highly accessible and scalable publishing techniques. Social media made other seemingly impossible events besides the Guk Cho • Yeon-ho Oh Book Concert happen. Thinking of Samsung by attorney Yong-Chul Kim became a best seller without any advertising in newspapers or television because one hundred fifty thousand people on Twitter promoted the book.

At the end of the 2-hour concert, Mr. Oh made a remark.

“We started the concert with the help of citizens. So I think that this concert should end by a closing ceremony of citizens.”

As Yeon-ho Oh finished, 30 members of the arrangement committee appeared on stage, ending the concert by singing “As Time Goes By” with choreography and guitar accompaniment. Their choreography was not perfect, but their message was clear.

“Don’t be small-minded, be confident. The sun will rise tomorrow. The sun will rise tomorrow.”

In the last chapter of Plan for Liberals to Seize Power, which has sold twenty three thousand copies in 2 months and has become a best seller in the politics section, Professor Cho and Mr. Oh promised to write a sequel with the help of citizens. This writer is looking forward to seeing what incredible work citizens will do in the next book and hopes that the sun will rise in the future through the power of citizens.

When I recommended last month that practicing and aspiring citizen journalists should write feature stories, I failed to include some tips that might help them out.

Below are a few thoughts to overcome “writer’s block” or fear of writing a feature story.

1) A feature is a soft news story that is rarely written in the traditional inverted pyramid style of a hard news story. A softer approach is most successful when writing a feature.

2) Features aren’t meant to deliver the news. They are often written to expand on a news story and should contain basic elements of the news story. But their main purpose is to add the human element, to add color and feeling.

3) Several different approaches can be used to write a feature. The story could be a personality profile, a human interest piece or a more in-depth look at an issue.

4) The story should be sprinkled with quotes, especially early in the article, to establish a good reader/source relationship. Quotes are always a great addition to a feature story and can be a wonderful way to end an article.

5) Don’t forget the photos. Like they say, a photo is worth 1,000 words. Make sure to get complete information about the people in any photo, where they are and what they are doing, so a complete cutline can be written.

Susan Cormier is the head coach in charge of training at the National Association of Citizen Journalists (http://www.nacj.us/) and co-author of the “Handbook for Citizen Journalists” (http://www.citizenjournalistnow.com/).

Reportr.net has a piece on how quickly wrong information was spread in the mainstream media from and through Twitter, using the events in Tucson as an example. I found this part interesting:

Journalism can be a messy process. This process used to take place behind close doors in newsrooms, as reporters and editors considered conflicting reports, weighed up incoming information and made decisions on what to publish.

Today, the process of journalism is taking place in public on media platforms such as Twitter. Information is published, disseminated, checked, confirmed or denied in public through a pro-am collaboration facilitated by social networks.

Instead of editors fact checking before publishing, mainstream news is depending on the public to do this. Remember this the next time someone tries to make the point that corporate journalism has a fact-checking filter that citizen journalism doesn’t. One could blame it on the rapid news cycles brought on by technology. Personally, I think that practices that were traditionally kept from public view on how the news is processed are finally surfacing. Corporate newsrooms are full of reporters and editors who are just as lost as the rest of us. One difference that may factor in this, especially in TV news, is that station managers tend to be promoted from the sales departments. So the big bosses in local TV news don’t have journalism backgrounds but come from an environment of selling air. This attitude of making money out of something abstract can affect the mood of the station–push out product to sell more air.

The public forgets their mistakes. In fact, the public is doing their jobs for them.

Giffords’ shooting shows process of journalism on Twitter

The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation has posted an interesting infographic and links to reports on how digital technology was used in multiple ways to connect and coordinate citizens and organizers in the Haitian earthquake relief effort. It points to how the lessons from this event can be used to aid in future disasters.

[HT to Hannah]

New Technologies Helped in Novel Ways with Haiti Earthquake Relief

Even though the 24-hour news networks have been covering the Tucson tragedy, citizen investigative journalists have been digging up issues related to Jared Loughner and the political environment that has been fingered as the main accomplice in the crime.

NowPublic has been current and has continually posted stories.

• Jared Loughner’s mug shot and court appearance
• Jordan Yerman noticed that talk radio host Joyce Kaufman (“If ballots don’t work, bullets will”) had gone silent on her Twitter account. As of this writing, her Twitter account if offline.
• The Westboro Baptist Church specifically targets 9-year-old victim Christina Green in its vitriol
• NowPublic links to Jared Loughner’s YouTube channel and finds that Rep. Gabrielle Giffords had subscribed to it.
• Of course, we need a conspiracy theory.

If you spend a couple of hours browsing citizen journalism websites and blogs, you’d be amazed to learn the variety of topics being covered by citizen journalists these days.

Citizens around the globe are covering everything from community affairs to automobile trends and from auto accidents to celebrities.

Take Grahamstown, for example. Citizen journalists in this small town in South Africa have informed their communities about 300 things they would never have known, according to a blog written by Professor Harry Dugmore, MTN Chair of Media and Mobile Communication at the School of Journalism and Media Studies at Rhodes University.

While some of the stories included big breaking news, others pieces came from small blog-like posts. The stories ranged from plans to close a poor performing school in Grahamstown to a report about an automobile accident.

“Almost without exception, these stories are about issues that Grocott’s Mail, the local paper that is also South Africa’s oldest independent newspaper, would not have been able to cover due to meager resources,” Dugmore wrote.

On citizen journalism sites such as Merinews, Cplash and STOMP, you’ll find stories about the report from the White House Commission the BP oil spill, factors affecting your CMS web design costs, the status of certain car manufacturers, a dog being beaten and rescued, and Pamela Anderson being named PETA’s person of the year.

Immigrants in the United States are even getting into the act.

In New York, operators of the queens7.com website hope to bring immigrant communities along the 7 train together with a mix of local news and advocacy. With the help of citizen journalists, the site covers issues of interest to immigrants in three communities, according to Noel Pangilinan, the site’s executive editor.

In California, Catherine Traywick, an immigration blogger for the Media Consortium, writes about the Mobile Voices program, through which immigrants in Southern California are using their cell phones to document their stories.

Then, there those very narrowly defined citizen journalism websites, such as citizen-news.org, which focuses mostly on health issues, and GlutenFreeVoice.com, which “was born out of a need to build a community of gluten-free persons … who understand what it means to be gluten free.”

The sites and the citizen journalists who contribute to them run the gamut. So I’m guessing if you have a specific interest and a desire to report, write and inform, you can find a site that’s right for you.

Susan Cormier is the head coach in charge of training at the National Association of Citizen Journalists (http://www.nacj.us/) and co-author of the “Handbook for Citizen Journalists” (http://www.citizenjournalistnow.com/).